Better Choices

The surest way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more.

But if weight loss is so simple, why do I have so much trouble with it?!
As it turns out, "eating less" is a very difficult task. Your body really wants those extra Calories, and you live in a world where food is very plentiful. Instead of foraging for your food, you're literally bombarded with opportunities to eat, and every food manufacturer tries to seduce you with their latest, tastiest offerings. You quickly develop food cravings that willpower alone cannot overcome. To win your "war" against food, you need to learn more about what you're eating...

All food is not created equal!
Don't beat yourself up about not having the will to eat less. The fact is that many high-Calorie foods have an unfair advantage against you. By over-stimulating your appetite, they deceive you into eating more than your body really needs. Many popular diets counter this by grouping foods into "approved" and "unapproved" lists. However, there's a downside to this restrictive approach. The inflexibility of these food lists makes eating very tedious and boring. Shouldn't eating be enjoyable?

Diets with limited food choices are also inconvenient. Did you know that the average US supermarket now adds nearly 10,000 new products to its shelves each year? If you're following a diet with a fixed list of approved foods, it's impossible to know which of these new foods are compatible with your diet. Wouldn't it be nice to have a way to analyze any food, and determine its suitability for your diet?

Get smarter about what you eat
Some modern diet programs do provide you with ways to judge new foods. For example, Atkins and other low-carb programs assess food value based on carbohydrate content. Unfortunately, though, this assessment can be quite limited. Do an orange and a chocolate eclair really have an equal impact on your body? Some low-carb practitioners seem to think so!

ND believes that you need a more powerful tool to assess a food's dietary benefit, and that's why we created the Better Choices Diet. The Better Choices Diet doesn't simply focus on a single nutrient (like carbs or fats). Instead, it analyzes the levels of up to twenty-eight individual nutrients, to help you determine how well each food supports your goal.

Is the Better Choices Diet right for you? Read on to learn more about this unique weight control plan...

The Better Choices Concept

For every food that you eat, there are likely to be other equally nutritious foods that will satisfy your hunger with fewer Calories.

The Better Choices Diet starts with a simple nutritional analysis of your current diet. It evaluates each food that you now eat, and recommends alternative foods that may provide more nutritional value and help you feel full on fewer Calories. Instead of shocking your body with an abrupt change in foods, the Better Choices Diet focuses on evolving your diet one food at a time.

Other benefits of the Better Choices DietUnlike many other diet plans, the Better Choices Diet:

Has no banned foods. Instead of rigid lists of "approved" and "unapproved" foods, the Better Choices Diet allows you to eat anything, but encourages you to make smarter food choices.

Requires no special foods or other investments. Everything you need to understand and use the Better Choices Diet is contained within this website.

Can be used with other diet plans. The tools and methods of the Better Choices Diet can also be used to improve the effectiveness of most other diet plans.

Can also be used for weight gaining diets. The Better Choices Diet is not just for weight loss; its about controlling your weight (up or down) through proper food selection and hunger control.

How the Better Choices Diet Evaluates Foods

The Better Choices Diet determines potential food substitutions with the help of ND's Nutritional Target Map, which maps food in relation to their predicted satiating effect (Fullness Factor) and nutrient density (ND Rating). Foods closer to the upper right corner of the Nutritional Target Map are Better Choices for healthy weight loss, and foods closer to the lower right corner are Better Choices for healthy weight gain.

Getting Started on the Better Choices Diet

The Better Choices Diet gives you the tools you need to consistently and accurately evaluate your diet, but its up to you to plan meals and take responsibility for your own food choices. As with everything else in life, this responsibility has its rewards. On this program, youll learn a lot about nutrition, and quickly discover which foods best support your goals.

Warning: This is a self-directed program.
Despite its potential benefits, the Better Choices Diet is not recommended for those with eating disorders or diet-related medical conditions. It is best suited for individuals who are only moderately overweight and reasonably self-disciplined. All diet analyses and food recommendations are provided interactively via this website. Although these services are free, no other specific dietary advice is provided. The Better Choices Diet also relies heavily on NDs Ratings and Fullness Factors. While these calculated values provide a reasonable scientific prediction of a foods benefit with relation to diet, they can not take into account every aspect of a foods value. For this reason, no guarantee can be made on the accuracy or suitability of this diet with respect to your individual needs. If in doubt, please consult a nutritionist or healthcare professional for more specific dietary recommendations.

The 4 Steps of the Better Choices Diet:

Make a daily record of everything you eat. Making a record of your diet is a very tedious task if you're using paper and pencil, but it's very easy to do with the My Tracking feature of My ND. Please read the My Tracking Help page to learn how to track and analyze your intake.

Determine which foods contribute the most Calories to your diet. The primary focus of the Better Choices Diet is to gradually replace some of the foods that you now eat with other foods that are more supportive of your goals. It makes sense to start with those foods that are contributing the most calories to your diet, since this is most likely to have the greatest positive impact on your progress. This step is automated with My Tracking. The tracking report that it generates includes a listing of all foods that you consumed, along with the percentage of calories that each supplied to your diet.

Make Better Choice substitutions for those foods. For each item on your tracking report, you'll also find links to Better Choice substitutions. Select your goal (weight loss, optimum health, or weight gain), and click on the link to explore the resulting list of foods. It's not important to choose foods that appear highest on the list—simply choose any of these foods that you would enjoy eating.

Repeat. Your goal is to gradually evolve your diet to include more nutritious and filling foods and less unhealthy and unsatisfying foods. Over time, as you incorporate more of these foods into your diet, the total calories that you consume will drop, and the overall nutrient density of your meals will increase.

Plus a Few Important Notes:

Keep sight of your goal. Don't get so caught up in trying to get better Ratings and FFs that you lose sight of your primary goal: you're trying to reduce the number of Calories that you consume. If you lower your total daily Calories while getting at least 100% of the FDAs Daily Values for all essential nutrients, you've succeeded.

Be realistic. Better Choices substitutions are scientifically chosen to benefit the average individual. Your own response to these foods may be better or worse than average. Therefore, you must make your own determination of how well a food works for you. The fact that one particular food is rated higher than another by Better Choices should not give you cause to eat it indiscriminately. Better Choices is about you making smarter choices and learning to control your diet.

Drink plenty of water. ND's Rating system gives water a relatively low rating, because it contains neither Calories nor any major nutrients. Please realize, however, that water itself is a very important nutrient. You'll feel better and your weight will be easier to manage if you drink plenty of water.

Don't try too hard. One of the most attractive benefits of the Better Choices Diet is that it allows you to more comfortably consume fewer Calories. If you have constant hunger and/or food cravings while on this plan, then youre probably changing your diet too much or too quickly. Youll have more success if you make smaller, more gradual changes.

Every little bit helps. There is no need to completely eliminate the foods that you love. You can make progress simply by making a Better Choices substitution for a portion of what you eat. For example, replacing the five chocolate chip cookies that you want to eat with a spinach salad would improve your diet, but could leave you craving chocolate chip cookies. A more productive choice might be to eat the spinach salad plus just one of those cookies. If the bulk of your meal is comprised of foods that fill you up, youre likely to consume fewer Calories overall.

Better Choices Serving Sizes

Another striking difference between Better Choices and most other diets is that Better Choices does not restrict the size of the servings that you eat. Of course, serving size is important. However, the reality is that if you place too many constraints on how you eat, it's much more likely that your diet will fail. Better Choices' approach is simply to reduce your Calorie intake, while allowing you to eat the same volume of food that you're accustom to eating.

Everyone eats too much on occasion. However, if you frequently feel "stuffed" or overly sluggish after eating, your meals are probably too large. If this is the case, make an attempt to gradually decrease your serving sizes. Where possible, prepare your own food rather than ordering from a restaurant. Fill your plate once, and don't go back for seconds. Serve your food on smaller plates to make the servings look larger. Try to eat more slowly. Any of these tips may help you eat smaller portions.

Additional Tips for Successful Weight Loss

Better Choices helps you select foods, but food selection is just one part of a successful diet plan. Please refer to ND's page on Dieting and Weight Loss for other important tips on controlling your weight.

Addendum 1: Better Choices versus Low-Carb and Low-GI Diets

The popular low-carb diets (e.g. Atkins, South Beach) recommend restricting carbohydrate intake. While there is evidence that supports the effectiveness of this dieting approach, you should also understand that low-carb is just one means of reaching the goal that is common of all diets  to curb overconsumption. The low-carb approach succeeds primarily because it helps you control hunger by minimizing the changes in blood sugar levels that are associated with carbohydrate digestion.

A similar, but somewhat more sophisticated, approach to dieting is taken by diets that focus on use of the Glycemic Index. The Glycemic Index (GI) differentiates carbohydrates into groups that have greater or lesser influence on blood sugar levels. Therefor, low-GI diets allow consumption of some, but not all, carbohydrates.

The primary fault of low-carb and low-GI dieting methods is that they place a fairly extreme focus on carbohydrate avoidance. This means missing out on certain high-carbohydrate foods (e.g. many fruits and vegetables) which are rich in essential nutrients. Low-carb meals also typically contain higher amounts of fat, which is more Calorie-dense than carbohydrates. Consequently, on low-carb and low-GI diets you can easily end up consuming more Calories, even though you think you're eating less!

The Better Choices Diet helps you curb overconsumption, but it does so in a completely different way. It encourages the selection of nutritious foods that produce greater feelings of satiety (fullness) with fewer total Calories. While many Better Choices substitutions are, coincidentally, low-carb and low-GI foods, Better Choices does not focus solely on carbohydrates. Better Choices allows you to effectively analyze all food types, and provides you a nearly unlimited number of food choices.

For a more complete discussion of how the Fullness Factor relates to Glycemic Index, Glycemic Load, and low-carb dieting, please see ND's Glycemic Index page.

Addendum 2: Better Choices for All Diets

The Better Choices Diet works well alone, but because it provides a powerful method for comparing different foods, it can also be used in conjunction with other diets to improve food selection. If youre on another diet plan, consider analyzing the foods on that diets approved list to determine their associated Ratings and Fullness Factors.

For example, although the popular Atkins diet has been an effective weight loss plan for many people, its own popularity created a mania among packaged food manufacturers. Soon, hundreds of different "low-carb" and "Atkins friendly" items appeared on food shelves. Some of these foods, although low in carbohydrates, may not be the best choice for dieting. With great taste and a lot of Calories, many of these foods actually encourage overconsumption. Think about it - do food manufacturers really want you to consume less of their product?

Addendum 3: Multiple Paths to Success

Its impossible to have a complete discussion about diet without addressing the psychological aspects of dieting. Most diets are very tough to follow. It seems that youre either hungry and irritable because youre staying away from the list of off-limit foods, or feeling guilty and mad because you didnt. And the way that most diets are designed, there is only one path to success  by following all of the diets rules  and multiple paths to failure. Binge on any of the forbidden foods, you fail. Eat too much of an allowed food, you fail. Eat at the wrong time, you fail... Now, is that any way to have fun?!

Step back for a moment, and take a fresh look at what youre really trying to accomplish. You didnt gain all that extra weight last week, did you? No, of course not. You probably accumulated the extra weight over the course of several years. It was a slow, gradual change that occurred because your daily Caloric intake for that period exceeded your daily Caloric expenditure by some small amount. The point is that small but permanent changes in your diet can put you back on track and create the permanent weight loss that you desire. The key word here is "permanent". The diet that will work best for you is the diet that you can stay on, and can accept as part of your new lifestyle.

The Better Choices Diet is that type of diet. It doesnt force you to conform to a set of overly strict dietary rules. It merely encourages you to make more intelligent food choices. The Better Choices Diet works because it offers you "multiple paths to success". For every food that you currently eat, it shows you dozens (or even hundreds) of other foods that are potentially healthier and more filling. You succeed every time you incorporate one of these alternative foods into your diet.